Thursday, November 18, 2010

Cataloging & Metadata Services has just completed a project to make all the publications from the Rocky Mountain Research Station that we own available in our catalog. To find these publications, you can search in Chinook for the titles of the individual publications, if you know them, or to see all the publications do an author search for Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station.

The Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station collection consists of station reports and papers published by the Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station Fort Collins, Colorado in conjunction with the Forest Service of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture from 1937-1997. Topics cover mostly forest and range management of the Rocky Mountain Region.

Highlights include:

• “Research Notes” (Gov A 13.69/8:1-84) of the Rocky Mountain Region on the various forest and range management methods such as burning, poisoning and “killing” undesirable native vegetation to encourage forest productivity.

• “Protect Your Pines from Bark Beetles” (Gov A13.69/7:P 52 and Gov A13.69/2:P 65) are pamphlets (mainly consisting of illustrations) published in the 1960s and reissued again in the 1980s on the eradication and control methods of the Mountain Pine Bark Beetle infestation. Insecticides such as DDT and burning as ways to kill Bark beetles were suggested.

CMS is now participating in the US National Library RDA Test as an informal tester. RDA stands for Resource Description and Access, the cataloging code that is intended to replace AACR2. A number of original catalogers in CMS are engaged in creating records in RDA, both bibliographic and authority records. Those who participate will create all original records exclusively in RDA, so that they don’t have to deal with 2 codes at the same time.

We have about a dozen bibliographic records and new authority records our original catalogers created using RDA in OCLC and exported to Chinook. Copy catalogers are bringing in RDA records when they are found in OCLC.

Since this is a major endeavor, an RDA Task Force was created and catalogers in other departments were invited to participate. Members are: Diana Anderson, Peter Rolla, Wen-Ying Lu, James Ascher and Steve Mantz. Windy Lundy serves as the Chair and our primary contact with the Library of Congress.

The OPAC display doesn’t look much different as we suppressed new MARC tags specific to RDA records, but you can see some RDA characteristics in the OPAC display:

It is still unknown whether RDA will be implemented. Once a decision is made to implement RDA by the national libraries (a decision should be made next spring), we will have wider communication and consultation with all in the Libraries about the public display, faceting (if possible) and any other considerations.